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64 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 14, 2011
hattan Theatre Club) under the Jon
Gnagy School of Playwriting. Instead
of letting his characters find the story,
Lindsay-Abaire figures out what he
wants to say and imposes on them a
situation that will say it. "Good People"
has a theme-the illusion of good-
ness-but no plausible story. There is
nothing beneath its showy surface; it is,
so to speak, a text with no sub.
Margaret (the edgy, excellent Fran-
ces McDormand), a fifty-year-old high-
school dropout from South Boston, is
fired from her job at a dollar store for
chronic lateness. She uses her severely
disabled daughter as her excuse. "It was
my J oycey again," she says. Margaret
is feisty, quick, and reckless. Every-
thing about her, even her refusal to lis-
ten to authority-she's a "mouthy from
Southie," with a whiff of racism and ho-
mophobia in her wisecracks-is plau-
sible; what's implausible is the path that
Lindsay- Abaire sets her on.
When one of her friends mentions
an old Southie boy who made good,
Dr. Mike Dillon (the resourceful Tate
Donovan), whom Margaret dated for
two months in high school, she decides
to go and ask him for a job. To me, this
is a stretch of the sociological imagina-
tion. A semi-literate woman with no
professional skills decides on a whim to
ask an accomplished man she hasn't
seen in more than thirty years to hire
her; the only reason I can see for this be-
havior, which goes against Margaret's
mortified, impoverished nature, is to get
her within shouting distance of a class
conflict. No sooner is she in Mike's of-
fice than her defensive hostility starts to
percolate. He uses "five-dollar words";
he attended the University of Penn-
sylvania ("I didn't go to U-Anywhere");
he lives in fashionable Chestnut Hill
("That's all I ever wanted-a big house
somewhere"). Margaret doesn't have a
chip on her shoulder; she has a wood-
pile. "You're like someone on a TV
show," she says to Mike; and so he
is-this is TV writing. When Margaret
overhears that Mike's wife is throwing
a party for him, she asks, "Can I come?"
and guilts him into extending her an
invitation. Finally, after about half an
hour, the seeds of a Lindsay-Abaire
drama have been planted: a person who
would never have put herself in such a
situation has been invited to a party by
a man who would not in a million years
allow such a manipulative, intrusive, de-
lusional, and toxic termagant to attend.
But there's more: using his six-year-old
daughter's illness as an excuse, the un-
derstandably wary doctor cancels the
party. Margaret has been told that the
party is cancelled; nonetheless, as you do
in bad drama, she comes anyway.
At one point, as Mike and his wife,
Kate (Renée Elise Goldsberry), talk
about their relationship, Kate says,
"We're having trouble. . . . Jesus, ev-
eryone knows! You spend five minutes
with us." But by then we've spent
twenty minutes with them without a
hint of trouble, except one oblique ref-
erence to seeing a counsellor. "Good
People" gets interesting only when
Margaret arrives at the house, and her
annihilating envy plays itself out. "You
got lucky," she tells Mike. "One hiccup
and it could've been you looking for
work instead of me." Margaret is ruth-
less and unrelenting. We watch, at once
infuriated and fascinated, as she works
to impose on Mike some of her own
humiliation, going so far as to suggest
that he is the father of her handicapped
daughter. "Don't say you didn't have
help getting out of Southie," she says.
"You had help. And not just your dad.
IfI hadn't let you go, you'd still be there
right now." Later, she adds, "I didn't
want to be the thing that ruined your
life. BECAUSE I WAS NICE." Mter Kate
challenges her story, Margaret back-
pedals and retracts the claim. The scene
is scary, well-written stuff, which the
actors perform skillfully, but Lindsay-
Abaire, who won a Pulitzer Prize for
his play "Rabbit Hole" a few years ago,
has been spending time in Hollywood,
and the industry's habitual glibness in-
fects the ending of the play, which
seems to me as fraudulent as it is be-
wildering. Lindsay- Abaire contrives a
windfall of dollars and dignity for Mar-
garet. At the finale, she and her friend
Jean (Becky Anne Baker) talk about
Mike over a game of bingo:
JEAN: You didn't mention Joyce?
MARGARET: No, I did. He didn't believe
she was his. (Pause) I always thought you
didn't know about that.
JEAN (looks at her): Everybody knew.
So he is Joyce's father? No, he isn't.
Yes, he really is. Are we on "Candid
Camerà'? .